How Brand Managers can amplify brand consistency with every email

Amandine Fernandez

Head of Acquisition

Maintaining brand consistency across myriad communication channels is tough. With Letsignit, there is one channel where consistency is easy. And it’s the single most used communication channel in the business world – your email signature.

Branding is important.

With a plethora of competing brands in every market segment, having a consistent and recognizable identity is one essential ingredient to marketplace success. Establishing an authentic brand image takes time and resources, though it pays dividends in customer loyalty, the ability to charge premium prices, and in differentiating your solution from the competition.

The Brand Manager’s role is tough. Backed by a “brand guideline” playbook, it is an immense challenge to regulate brand consistency across various marketing and communications channels, across departments, and across different functional elements of the business.

‍There is one place we help make this monumentous task easy – by standardizing and centralizing management of the most commonly used communication channel in business – email and, more specifically, the email signature.

The Brand Manager’s Obsession: Maintaining cross-channel consistency

Brand Managers need to guide and control what is being seen on all channels.

‍To keep up with growing content needs and to maintain brand consistency, most marketers rely on Marketing Resources Management (MRM) to help organize their marketing initiatives. MRM helps centralize brand resources, but each activation of these assets depends on a specific tool;

a Content Management System (CMS) for websites,
an automation solution for email campaigns,
social media platforms and tools, etc.

Inevitably, within each of these solutions inconsistencies are possible – too often branding takes a backseat and lacks consistent messaging across channels. In today’s fast-paced world, content and daily communications with clients can often feel rushed. For example, using too many stock photos in content because of ease of access can really water down your visual narrative. It can be worth the time to ensure your branding is driven by your brand tone of voice, personality, and visual library.

Is there an easy way to convey brand consistency on a daily basis?

Are the emails and email signatures on the brand manager’s radar?

Out of all the communications sent by your company, the most visible is the email. No, we are not talking about curated newsletters sent by the company, but regular everyday emails. Those sent by employees to clients, customers, prospects, and partners. Too often, emails carry an artisanal style signature with inconsistencies such as color, font, and inconsistent or even inaccurate information.

According to the Adobe Email Usage Study, Americans spend up to 5 hours a day checking their email (work and personal).

Should the email signature really be overlooked when it plays such a big part in daily communication?

Email is anything but a secondary channel. But, paradoxically, the email signature is not always on the radar of brand managers. Too often companies let employees create their own email signatures, without thinking about how it might appear to others. The scope for brand managers continues to expand, especially as companies embrace digital transformation to survive in today’s business world.

Amplify your communication

Good news, it is easy today to ensure the conformity of an email signature with the identity of a brand. A centralized signature management solution like Letsignit makes it possible to provide employees with different models and to adapt them according to their subsidiary, team or function. One of the easiest ways for a brand manager to defend the brand is by involving the first stakeholders: the employees.

About the author

Amandine is the Head of Acquisition at Letsignit! Initially a content specialist, she now actively contributes to the profitability of acquisition channels: SEO, SEA, SMA, SMO... Amandine is also one of the pillars of Marketing at Letsignit! For more than 5 years, she has been participating in and initiating marketing projects and campaigns that systematically reflect her vision, writing style, and creativity (which can also be seen in all of her colorful outfits that brighten up the day of everyone she meets).

About Letsignit

With Letsignit email signature manager, connect with your audience in a way that's on-brand and personal, while driving quality lead generation.

Frequently
asked questions

Is it possible to track the number of clicks on email signatures?

Yes, with the 'Campaigns' offer, it is possible to track the number of clicks on the email signatures of all your employees in the 'Statistics' area of the platform.

You can then access a detailed or global view of the number of clicks on the email signatures of each employee. You can use the search option to target a specific signature or a given period. Finally, you have the possibility to export all statistics to an Excel document.

If you launch campaigns with banners inserted in your email signatures, you can also access their performance via this same space.

Can we add links to social networks, our website, and appointment-setting applications such as Calendly?

With Letsignit, you can easily add social network icons in your collaborators' email signatures and link to your company pages. Also, our "attributes" feature allows you to manage personalized URLs for each of your collaborators such as their individual LinkedIn profile.

And that's not all: you can add links to an appointment-setting application, allow your customers to leave reviews easily, and integrate our 'Chat on Teams' widget to let anyone start a discussion via Microsoft Teams chat.

Can employees update their signature information themselves (number, function, etc.)?

It’s up to you! As an administrator of the Letsignit platform, you choose whether or not to grant modification rights to your employees. These permissions are managed on an attribute-by-attribute basis, which means that you can decide to allow the employee to change their phone number, but not the address of your premises, for example.

This feature applies to all attributes in your directory, including custom attributes created on Letsignit. When your employees change one or more attributes, your directory is obviously not affected.

Why it is important to standardize our email signatures on a large scale to ensure our identity and brand image?

It often happens that employees make their email signature their own: custom format, bad fonts, colors inconsistent with the brand standards... all of this has an impact on your brand!

A consistent visual identity is considered authentic and outperforms a perceived weak one by 20%. And, your customers are 2.4 times more likely to buy your products.

With Letsignit, take back control over your brand identity by standardizing all your email signatures. Our tool has many features that allow you to customize your signatures by department, by audience or by subsidiary. Not to mention the possibility of carrying out campaigns within your email signatures thanks to our Campaign offer.

What is the user experience like for our employees?

If you opt for the Letsignit Add-in for Outlook, they will have a dedicated space in their Outlook account where they will be able to view the signatures and campaigns assigned to them.
If you opt for the Letsignit Desktop APP, they will be able to preview all their signatures and campaigns in this space. If they want to change their default signature to another one when sending an email, this will be done in their signature library in Outlook.

In both cases:

They preview their signature before sending an email and choose from signatures assigned to them.
Based on the permissions granted, they will also be able to modify their personal information such as their name, position, or address in these spaces.

In short, they have autonomy in their email signature, but you keep control on the field, signatures, and banners they can edit or use.

Can my employees have multiple signatures available to them?

With our "multi-signature" feature, your employees can benefit from multiple email signatures. No technical manipulation is required. Thanks to our Add-in for Outlook or the desktop app, they can change their email signatures as they wish with just a few clicks.

Regarding the creation of email signatures, you can make several variations such as:

An English, Spanish, etc. version to adapt it to your audience
A signature template with timely promotional banners.
Use different formats of your logo according to your subsidiaries.
A signature for each of your branches.
Signature banners created especially for internal exchanges.
A simplified version for reply/forward of emails.

Everything has been thought of to go further in the personalization process based on the recipient of your emails.

Regarding “Green IT,” have you implemented measures to limit the digital footprint of email signatures?

If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.

As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:

Optimization of the weight of signatures and campaigns in emails.
Green features: lightening of signatures during response/transfer emails, possibility of not embedding images, implementation of lighter signatures for internal exchanges.
Integration of a 'Switch to Teams' widget to encourage your employees to continue their exchanges via chat, rather than email.

As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.